Almond Cake A l'Orange

 Apparently, this recipe hails from Mallorca. But I picked it up from the German news magazine Der Spiegel. As per usual I did it a bit differently (the icing)

What you need

• 6 eggs
• 150g sugar granulated
• 1 orange
• 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
• 1 pinch of salt
• icing sugar
• 200g ground almonds

Equipment

• 3 bowls
• kitchen mixer and blender with whisks
• grater
• juicer
• mug
• spring baking form
• aluminium foil
• brush
• sprinkler for icing sugar

How you do it

• preheat the oven to ca 170-180C
• assemble and grease the baking form and sprinkle ground almonds evenly on the inside. 
• put the ground almonds into a bowl. Add the cinnamon. Then using a grater grate the skin of the orange into the ground almonds. Be sure that you only grate the orange coloured - not the white - part of the skin. Mix well, best to do it manually using a whisk.
• take the eggs and separate yolk and egg white into 2 separate bowls. 
• to the egg yolk add half of the sugar (75g) and, using a blender or mixer, whisk it for ca 5min until it looks bright and is creamy
• pour the almond/orange zest/cinnamon mix into the bowl with the yolk sugar mix and manually mix well. It should have paste like consistency.
• clean the whisk of the mixer thoroughly - no egg yolk/sugar should be left on it. In the second bowl, add a pinch of salt to the egg white and whisk it for 5 min. When it starts to stiffen pour the sugar in slowly. The egg white should stiffen noticeably. You'll notice when the whisking will leave little "cones" in the egg white. 
• mix the egg white/sugar carefully into the bowl with the almond/egg yolk mix. I usually use a large spoon and carefully lift and stir so that it becomes a smooth paste.
• pour this paste into the baking form and smoothen it up on the top
• bake for 50min
• after ca 25min (when the top starts to turn brown), take the form briefly out of the oven and cover with an aluminium foil. Put it back into the oven and back for 20min. For the last 5min, remove the foil from the form.
• remove the form from the oven. Carefully separate the cake from the edge of the form with a knife.
• after a few minutes you can "open" the spring form

Icing

• juice the orange and pour into a mug
• add icing sugar to the juice while stirring (with a fork e.g.). Keep adding icing sugar until the juice/sugar mix turns into a thick-ish paste.
• slowly put the sugar/juice mix on the top of the cake and, using the brush distribute evenly over the surface
• using an icing sugar sprinkler add icing sugar on top.